Colombia's coca crop booms despite US-backed crackdown

Wednesday 18 June 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Wednesday 18 June 2008 19.01 EDT

Colombia's coca crop increased by 27% last year, a surge which has shocked the United Nations and raised fresh questions about Bogotá's US-backed "war" on drugs. Cultivation unexpectedly boomed in the country that is the world's leading supplier of cocaine, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's annual report, published yesterday.

"The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and shock: a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation," the organisation's executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, said in a statement.

Some 99,000 hectares, or 382 square miles, of coca crops were found in Colombia last year, up from 78,000 hectares in 2006. Coca cultivation increased by 4% in Peru and 5% in Bolivia, the survey reported, revealing an Andean-wide surge in the production of the raw ingredient for cocaine.

The news was a blow to Bogotá's multi-billion dollar, US-backed crackdown on guerrillas and armed groups that control many of the remote areas where the plant is grown.

General Oscar Naranjo, chief of Colombia's police, sought comfort in estimates that cocaine production was stable, at 994 tonnes, compared with 984 tonnes in 2006. The boom in cultivation did not yield correspondingly greater cocaine because police pressure had interrupted the growing cycle, he told a media conference. "These young crops, the new ones, are less productive."

The UN report said almost half of Colombia's coca came from just 10 of the country's 195 municipalities. "Just like in Afghanistan, where most opium is grown in provinces with a heavy Taliban presence, in Colombia most coca is grown in areas controlled by insurgents."